I am excited about Leopard, I really am. but there are also a few things that really bothered me, when i watched the WWDC coverage. things that looked like bad decisions, designwise. Andrew Escobar summed things up already and I pretty much agree with everything he said. what really bugged me though is the transparent menu bar. I mean, it was always about the legibility, after all it is a very important part of the OS, but now? it looks like somebody broke into Vista and stole the effect. and you should definitely never do that.
it seems I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the new look. the guys at Many Tricks quickly designed a little app to fix this ugly mistake. good. but not hardcore enough for me. I’m one of these people who close every program every few minutes in order to save memory and CPU processing time. learned that back on the PC when we used to play with EMS and XMS memory. fun.
so I figured the best way to solve this would be by having a manipulated background image, that just had white in the place where the menu bar would go. and it worked. no need for an extra service running in the background. a little more work at first, but I like my solution.
I also made it a simple Photoshop file so that you could fix all your background images and wallpapers.
download: my OSX Leopard non-transparent Menu Bar Photoshop Image
Fixing Leopard’s ugly Menus
I am excited about Leopard, I really am. but there are also a few things that really bothered me, when i watched the WWDC coverage. things that looked like bad decisions, designwise. Andrew Escobar summed things up already and I pretty much agree with everything he said. what really bugged me though is the transparent menu bar. I mean, it was always about the legibility, after all it is a very important part of the OS, but now? it looks like somebody broke into Vista and stole the effect. and you should definitely never do that.
it seems I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the new look. the guys at Many Tricks quickly designed a little app to fix this ugly mistake. good. but not hardcore enough for me. I’m one of these people who close every program every few minutes in order to save memory and CPU processing time. learned that back on the PC when we used to play with EMS and XMS memory. fun.
so I figured the best way to solve this would be by having a manipulated background image, that just had white in the place where the menu bar would go. and it worked. no need for an extra service running in the background. a little more work at first, but I like my solution.
I also made it a simple Photoshop file so that you could fix all your background images and wallpapers.
download: my OSX Leopard non-transparent Menu Bar Photoshop Image
